Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Short and Sweet

I caught a lot of grief for my too long blog the other day so I decided to make this quick and save my few readers any discomfort of having to slow down and read carefully!

So, I have one of those faces, I've been told, you know friendly, open. The kind of face that says" sure you can talk to me!" So lots of people talk to me. Everywhere I go, grocery stores, department stores, doctor's offices, any public place. They want my advice, my opinion, my help and my sympathy. I give it, OF COURSE! So there I was at Walmart (the place to buy just about anything around here) looking at birdseed(my new best hobby) and next to me was a sweet elderly woman, small and maybe in her 80's. Right away she started chatting me up. In the ten minutes I stood there with her she told me about her dissatisfaction with Walmart because they were always running out of the 2lb sacks of seed and she came every week and bought 7 bags, 1 for each day of the week to feed her birds, her family she called them. She explained that she was too weak to handle the larger bags so she really needed Walmart to keep this particular brand stocked. She went on to tell me about her husband passing and her children living too far away to visit often and that she lived all by herself in a really big house(she told me exactly where her house was too and it is really big BTW). That she used to have a little dog named Bert but she had to put him to sleep because he was having pain walking. Now the birds were her friends and she fed them every morning one bag a day. O.K.first of all, I was fixated on the brand of seed, and I kept trying to ask her if it was the best kind, was that the kind the Quail liked? We have to make the Quails happy for God's sake.At some point she said to me kind of dismissively, "I don't know if they like the seed it's just the right size! " Then it dawned on me. Fast forward to my life. Here I am 25 years later, and I am at Walmart talking to anyone who will listen to me about birdseed bag size. WOW. I snapped back to this sweet lady and I realized by now I was welling up with tears.I wanted to hug her(NOT OK) and tell her I would be her friend...oh that sounds sane, and tell her I would be happy to help her with big bags of seed if she wanted. Luckily she said something like, well thanks glad I found somebody to talk to, I usually do!!!
Like hey girlfriend you're not that special!!! Oh well.
I am all about looking for signs along the way and I am not sure what this one meant other then we are all in this crazy world together and sometimes birdseed is just birdseed.